by Lee Isserow
“Three...”
The elevator doors gasped open on the operations level, the Tacks filing out and splitting into two groups of four going in opposite directions, their weapons primed.
“Two...”
Something massive and dark was coming to the surface of the Thames by Millbank. It was moving from the depths of the river with haste, saturating with a deep crimson as it came closer and closer to the surface.
“One...”
The Tack standing in front of the security guards smiled wide. His chest exploded outwards, two massive arms of blood bursting forth, each taking half a rib cage with them, like giant bony hands. The arms gored the two security guards with their rib claws, tearing massive chucks of meat out of their doughy bodies.
On the upper floors, shotgun blasts fired out, and panic set in as security services officers realised they were under attack. The buckshot only seemed to break objects, hit walls, but cover was taken, guns were drawn, shots were fired. The attackers, seven of them, all clad in black neither slowed nor seemed injured as the slugs burst through their bodies.
Underground on the operations level, four Tacks entered the Tack's locker room and opened fire on the others hastily getting dressed to fight off the incursion. At the Operations Room itself, another four burst in and fired at monitors and computers, before they began tearing phones out of sockets, killing contact with the outside world.
The running taps stopped flowing with water, and started flowing with blood. It came out thick and syrupy, snaking out of the sinks and coalescing on the ground into the shape of dogs. Not the adorable vestigially limbed puppies they had learned to become with Luke on the dock, these were blood hounds, no soft curves and smooth surfaces, they were long limbed with hard skin, all sharp angles. They blood continued to pour from the taps, and the pack of dogs continued to grow in number.
As the Tack at the Squad's entrance pulled the door open for Ben and his men to enter, the surface of the Thames was broken by a explosive blast from under the water. A massive gush of liquid blood rocketing into the air thirty metres above sea level. Hundreds upon hundreds of litres that arced over the river bank, aiming directly for the open door.
Ben and the Tacks stood back as the blood slammed through the slim gap, filling up the grand entrance with a tsunami of free blood all massed together. The doors to all the elevators dinged open. A Tack in each of them, ready to ferry the blood, the Tacks and Ben into the bowels of the building. The eight men entered the first elevator, the blood filling the other two with as much of it as it could fit in, the majority of it waiting in the entrance for the lifts to come back up so it could join the fight.
Ben smiled as the doors closed on the entrance. “You started a war... we'll give you a bloody war.”
18
The elevator doors opened on the first lower basement, and Ben exited, the Tacks holding back behind him. The walls were papered with black and gold flock wallpaper, thick red carpets underfoot. There was an air of luxury to the corridor that he had not seen on the few floors he had been allowed access to. This was a level he had never stepped foot on before, one that he had heard an analyst once mention was where the main research into the infection was carried out. As he walked through the hallway, he nudged doors open. The first appeared to be a library or reading room, and looked like something out of a gentleman's club or palatial mansion. Twelve metre tall ceilings, walls covered in bookshelves, loaded with books that looked leather bound, old, first editions. The next room he entered was much the same, but with medical texts. The room after that a grand dining room with twenty tables laid out around the room. These people were surrounded by opulence, treated a hell of a lot better than Ben had been treated on the Operations level. His library was barely three metres long and wide, his meals were all eaten in the crappy canteen that the analysts ate in. It appeared that the scientists were endowed with a respect that the rest of the Squad's staff could only imagine. A class difference, Ben thought, even though by all accounts the Tacks did more for their cause, certainly accomplished more than the scientists ever had.
He continued on his journey through the hallways, hoping to come across a lab and some researchers soon. Time was ticking away, and this was only the first of many stops he would be making before he would be ready to get to the operations floor to find Steve.
On the upper floors, consternation was thick in the air. The gunfire continued, staff hiding behind the desks, all too terror-struck to notice that nobody had been injured. Neither Ben nor the blood had any wish to harm these people. As far as they knew, MI5 was completely uninvolved with the Squad's activity.
At the main entrance, the Tack had devoured the fluids from the two security guards, and exited the body it had been occupying. The creature went behind the large, heavy security desk and flung it towards the door, blocking entry or exit. Ben had instructed it as such, all the entrances needed to be blocked. CO19 would be called due to the MI5 incursion. He wanted them preoccupied with the gunfire above ground, focussed on the panic from the officers and analysts that worked for the security services. Their call would be the priority, should the Squad attempt to contact the armed response unit for reinforcements.
The hounds had devoured the few Squad staff that tried to hide in the toilets, and joined the rest of the blood that had come out of the taps in the Operations level. They made its way out of the toilets and clung to the ceilings, spreading out, coating them with an inch-thick layer of glossy scarlet. This was where they were to remain, until it was time to strike. Ben was certain that nobody would notice the bright red ceiling, and if they did, it would easily be mistaken for a new shade of paint and nothing more.
Plus, the staff on the Operations floor were all otherwise engaged, given that their Tacks had started shooting at each other, and a further four were blowing the hell out of the equipment in the Operations Room itself.
An alarm sounded, a piercing scream that wailed through the walls with shrill determination to alert everyone on the level to the attack. Ailes was in his office, shouting over the top of the electronic caterwaul down the phone to alert Steve, the Tacks, the agents, the new recruits – anyone who would answer his call.
Ben entered a laboratory and sent spikes tearing through his skin, through his clothes, across the room and into the telephones on the wall and desks. As he pulled them back into his body, the scientists froze, terrified. The light scent of urine wafting across the room as one of them wet themselves.
“You don't have to be afraid,” Ben said. “Not if you do as I tell you.”
“Graham,” said a tall, thin man in his sixties.
Ben recognised him, more by his voice than his face. That monotone had been drilled into his skull, mumbling facts read off a tablet that were delivered with so little passion they almost instantly sent him to sleep.
“Fairchild.” he said, a lilting smile on his lips.
“You don't have to do this, my boy. We can help you...”
“You really can't,” Ben said, sending a spike across the room, nailing a scientist to the wall by the shoulder.
A phone fell from the man's hand and bounced across the shiny polished concrete floor.
“Like I said, you don't have to be afraid if you do as I tell you...“ he sighed and pulled the spike back once again, the scientist dropping to the floor, weeping as he held his wound with his one working hand.
The man's lips were quivering, he was wide-eyed, shaking with fear, looking like he was about to start convulsing. “I'm... I'm... infected!”
“It's really not that bad,” Ben said, sighing. He turned his attention back to Fairchild. “Where do you keep your data?” he asked.
Fairchild scowled. His thin lips pursing, becoming all the more thin and pale. Ben rolled his eyes and walked towards the scientist, as he silently asked the blood to instil fear in the man. Fingers of plasma started to form under his skin, stretching and contorting the shape of his face. The epidermis tore, a hundred gash
es forming all over Ben's body as sharp claws of scabrous bone burst out. The four largest, from his waist, lifted him up on the spider legs he had used before, tick-tacking on the floor beneath him with every step.
“Do I look like I'm going to get bored and leave?” he asked, the spider legs leaning his upper body forward, razor sharp talons getting all that much closer to Fairchild's face.
The old man was trying to keep his fear at bay, but as the tips of the claws met his skin, as he felt them scraping softly, caressing his cheeks and forehead with their rough texture, he couldn't keep it in any longer. His arm shot out, pointing to a wall on the far side of the room.
Ben glanced over. It looked just like the rest of the walls, nothing remarkable about it. “Show me,” he said, pulling himself back from the scientist, the long spindly legs settling his feet back on the ground.
Fairchild walked over to it and placed his ID against the wall. There was a mechanical gasp, and the wall receded into itself, revealing a small room full of servers.
“This is only the local backup,” Fairchild said.
“Where's your cloud storage?”
“Camelot Solutions,” the old man spat, scowling at Ben. “But you'll never get them all, they have servers in Utah, Shanghai, Bangladesh, You'll never get them, never get that far across the world!”
“Well, it's a good thing there's already blood all across the world...” Ben said, with a smile.
As the Tacks pushed past Fairchild and started tearing the servers apart, he sent a message through to the blood, to all the free blood, across the globe. They had the name of the company, the locations, and by the time the sun came up, Camelot Solutions would be no more. The data would be no more. And as long as everything else continued to go according to plan, The Blood Squad would be no more.
19
Ben's next stop was two levels down, the Tack's living quarters. He was erring on the side of caution, believing that only some of the Tacks would be fondling the weapons in the locker room. The majority of them, he wagered, would be in their quarters, on-call. Waiting for a mission, and an excuse to murder, to land in their laps. He knew that a call would have gone out, that Ailes or the analysts would have sent up a warning flare, but he was confident that some of them would take the alarms for a drill.`
In the elevator, the free blood left the bodies of the seven reanimated Tacks, and surrounded Ben. He felt sharp horns drill through his body, ripping through the flesh in his thighs and chest, back and arms. The blood began to enter his body, his skin stretching, contorting, becoming tort and thin. There were over thirty litres trying to force their way under his pallid pelt, trying to course down the same veins, be pumped by the same heart that was used to only a fraction of the volume of fluids.
He felt light headed, as the plasma continued to enter him, filling him up, making his frame a corpulent weight that hung on his bones. The blood knew it was a burden, and changed tack, encasing his skeleton with itself, thickening him from the core, ossifying to strengthen and reinforce. It could tell that was not enough, the muscles also needed support. That much weight, pounds upon pounds of extra load to carry, Ben couldn't do it alone. The blood saturated the muscles, filled and surrounded them, bulked them up and began to harden, not completely, just enough to give him the strength to carry their mass with greater ease.
As the doors to the elevator opened, Ben forced his way out, they were barely wide enough to facilitate his exit. He had to sidestep out, feet heavy and plodding, footsteps thick and loud in the empty corridor. He walked along the hall, getting used to his new girth and the seismic fluctuations that came with every movement. He was never graceful, never had poise, but as he trained himself to walk with this new rotund frame, it felt as though his previous body shape had been that of a gazelle in comparison.
There was movement up ahead. A flurry of footsteps, dull thuds of Tack issue boots. He took a deep breath, through lungs that were struggling to oxygenate his body, and readied himself.
Only three Tacks came round the corner, all out of uniform, and all with familiar faces. The last time Ben had seen them was when Chris's free blood launched itself at them and started drinking them down.
The one at the front pulled something from his pocket, a small pearlescent cube that fit snugly in his hand.
“You don't have to do this...” Ben said.
But the man wasn't interested in what he had to say. He started picking up speed, coming towards Ben as he whipped the object around with his fingers, a blade appearing at the centre. It was a butterfly knife. The Tack dug it into his wrist as he was just meters away from Ben, the blade tearing straight through between his radius and ulnar, point coming out the other side. He used all his strength and wrenched the knife down through the muscle, tearing all the way to the edge of his palm and pulled the knife out as two 'goblins poured out of either side of his wrist, coalescing with speed. The teeth on the left aiming for Ben's heavy gut, the ones on the right destined for his thick throat.
The jaws clamped down, deep gargles and growls emanating with their frustration as their scabrous fangs grated against his body, tearing at the skin, but unable to get any deeper than the surface. Under Ben's epidermis, the blood had temporarily hardened, creating a thick suit of armour he wore under his skin.
“We don't have to do this,” Ben said again, trying to compel the Tack to see reason.
The man saw only blood. He pulled the 'goblins back momentarily, then sent them towards Ben's face, all too aware that whilst the 'goblins might not be able to bite through his skin, they could certainly do damage to his eyes. If he were blind, their former colleague would be all but helpless.
Ben saw the attack coming. He could feel it, hear the desperate whispered scream as the Tack ordered his blood to attack again. He was faster than the angry, unconstrained 'goblins. His blood was faster. A hundred slim razor-tipped tentacles tore out of his chest, penetrating the Tack's body from head to toe. He drunk the man down, the roars from the 'goblins dissipating as they were sucked through their host and devoured by Ben's blood, adding yet further to his mass, skin ripping and repairing as he expanded yet again.
As he withdrew the tentacles, the dessicated body of the Tack fell to the floor, and Ben looked up to the two remaining men. “Like I said, we don't have to do this...”
The Tacks weren't interested in his plea for peace. As far as they were concerned, he was the enemy, blood driven, and he needed to be taken down.
Ben sighed as they came for him. He truly wished there was any other way this could have gone. But that didn't stop him from ripping the men to shreds and supping down their sanguine fluids. This was a war, after all, and they had the misfortune of picking the wrong side.
20
The Tacks on the upper floors had run out of ammunition. The security services agents appeared all too aware of this, and fired round after round into their bodies, splattering their internal fluids across the walls, ceilings and floors of their departments.
It took more rounds than they were used to putting into suspects, which they put down to the body armour that seemed all too familiar. On closer inspection, they would find it was government issue, and that would lead to a whole host of questions down the line.
But that was not where the curiosities would end. When the investigation began into the assault and eventual incapacitation of the assailants, they would discover that the deceased men and women were completely drained of blood. Not to mention all the splatter on the scene, that initially stained the walls and ceiling and floors had completely vanished. Stranger still, when they tried to move the bodies, some limbs just fell clean off, as if they were giant rag dolls with the stitching removed.
Those investigating the incident would never get answers to any of their questions. For even though the truth lay literally under their feet, it was figuratively above their pay grade. They would also never know how close they were standing to the site of a massacre, where so many died, and so much was
sacrificed for the greater good.
21
The elevator doors exhaled a deep groan, the mechanism struggling with the weight contained within. Ben sidestepped through to the hallway, squeezing his doughy bulk through the gap that was not meant for such a wide load.
A silence hung in the air, and he listened to the whisper in his blood. It told him that the eight reanimated Tacks on the floor were all dead, dispersed or drunk down, but not before they managed to accomplish the task at hand. All the computers and interfaces had been successfully destroyed. They had tracked down all the Tacks and dispatched with them before they in turn were extirpated.
Ben took his time as he walked towards the Operations Room, each step slow and purposeful. He was all too aware of how loud and heavy his footfall had become. Coming to the glass walls of Operations, he discovered intricate webs of cracks across the surface, each spanning out from an initial focal point. Rounds had hit it, intended for any number of other targets, and the bullet proofing had kept it in tact, but in the process, turned the transparent sheets of glass into an opaque wall.
There was a tingle under his skin as he reached for the handle. The sensation was familiar, like a long-delayed rush of oxytocin from a warm embrace once forgotten, a frisson from a past life. He pulled the door open and knew exactly what would be waiting for him when he did so.
Tess tried to force a smile to her face. It was laboured, twinned with an unconscionable fear in her eyes that she was trying with all her might to suppress.
“You don't have to be afraid,” he said, sensing her fear not only from her expression, but through the blood. “I would never hurt you. You know that, right?”